REFLECTION
EAST OF KIDRON
Martí Colom
It is not hard to imagine Jesus sitting on
an bank of the Mount of Olives, maybe with his back against the trunk of a
sturdy tree, perhaps with a sprig of rosemary on his lips, looking, across the
Kidron Valley, at the breathtaking view of the temple, with the sun shining on
its perfect walls and huge blocks of yellowish stone.
The temple that Jesus observes is quite
new: Herod the Great began to lift it some twenty years before the birth of the
son of Mary, and its construction lasted until recently. Thus Jesus is seeing a
building that has just been completed, in all its glory and radiance, a
structure designed to impress and provoke admiration, another large edifice of
a king who has loved ambitious architectural projects (like Caesarea by the Sea
or his palace in the fortress of Masada). With this magnificent temple Herod
intended to leave the final imprint of his own name and a permanent reminder of
his long reign in the city called holy. Herod was a remarkable politician who
managed to stay in power for over thirty years thanks to both shrewdness and
brutality. By building the temple he, whose Jewish identity had always been
questioned because of his Edomite origin, wanted to win the support and
appreciation of the people and of the powerful Sadducee party.
What nobody knows yet is that the temple
will not last a century, and that in the year 70 the wrath of Rome will
demolish Herod’s great project. Now, when Jesus of Nazareth looks at its
defiant walls with concern, the temple seems destined to remain here for a
thousand years.
What does Jesus think? What does he feel?
Let's imagine it: Jesus suffers. He opposes everything this temple represents.
Throughout a long personal itinerary that took him from his native Galilee to
spend time with John the Baptist in the desert, and then back to Galilee, now
he clearly sees the incoherence, the absurdity, the distortion of the faith
that this temple embodies. In the fertile lands of Galilee Jesus has grasped
that the Spirit of God is present in every person and in daily life. He has
understood that all exclusions are manmade and only serve the interests of
those who wish to impose their will on the rest. Jesus has chewed the verses of
Isaiah in which the prophet speaks for God saying, “I have had enough of burnt
offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of
bulls, or of lambs, or of goats… learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the
oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:11, 17).
And now this new temple disfigures again
the compassionate face of God, poisoning its tenderness, masking its sweetness.
The temple is conceived as a series of separate spaces that sharply divide the
world of the “sacred” from that of the “mundane”, when in fact this beautiful
world and everything in it is God's work! Jesus knows that
the well-defined areas of the temple, ever more exclusive (the courtyard of the
gentiles, the space for men, for the priests, the holy of holies...) serve to
reduce men and women to the stature of children or even worse, slaves. The
temple is a monument to fear, yet God is a breath of hope. And worse still: the
temple is also a lucrative business where some take advantage of the sincere
faith of the people.
Jesus suffers. East of Kidron.
This vignette of a tired, even outraged
Jesus, sitting and watching with pain the temple from the Mount of Olives,
provides an image to indicate that there are still today other "Kidron
rivers": they are the lines that define where do we stand in relation to
religious power. Maybe they will not be a stream or a mountain, but they are
present in our decisions, in our way of looking at the world, in our hearts. It
remains very important, if the experience of Jesus matters to us, to be able to
remain always east of Kidron.
East of Kidron we realize that all spaces
are God’s, not just the temples. More so, east of Kidron we learn that very
often the paraphernalia of the great shrines is of little help to the
liberation of those who open themselves to God in their hearts, being able to
see and recognize God in others, in human situations of joy or pain, in the
streets, on the road. East of Kidron we learn not to trust puritan views that
promote sharp separations between saints and sinners. We fear, east of Kidron,
the attraction of magical places: and we fear it because we know that when
someone decides that this or that space is a promised land, soon others will
say that it is “my” promised land where “you” have no right to live. And in the
process, once again, we will have forgotten that all land is holy. East of
Kidron we sense that the splendor and the magnificence of our buildings are
projections of the importance that we would like to have, but inaccurate
readings of God’s soul. God loves discretion and simplicity. Huge temples do
not speak about God’s goodness; they speak of man’s arrogance, of our
delusions, of our need for admiration and of our power struggles. East of
Kidron we grow in relationship with a God that cares deeply for all people.
East of Kidron we decide not to seek refuge in artificial languages, in
affected gestures or in pretentious religious titles; all these would soon
become reasons for us to move away from people, with the excuse of getting
closer to God. East of Kidron we use everyday language, we show ourselves as we
are, we live without hierarchies and we know that we get closer to God as we
get closer to others. East of Kidron there is a garden without walls, an open
space where everyone is welcomed. There, nothing protects us and nothing
asphyxiates us. East of Kidron we find the land of men and women that want to
live their dignity in freedom, as adults.
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